


this is not really happening (you bet your life it is)

by ohyondermemphis



Series: A 90s Mixtape [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: A 90s Mixtape, Albus Is Probably Going To Start Smoking, F/M, Female Harry Potter, Growing Up Together @ Wools, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Tom Riddle Born In Harry’s Timeline, Your Standard Evil Adult, Your Standard Evil Children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:35:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26744476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohyondermemphis/pseuds/ohyondermemphis
Summary: “I didn’t know James was my middle name.” She whispers along the rattle and hum of a too old air con unit that hangs halfway out the window. Summer isn’t over yet, it's just the first of August.The marks showed up yesterday.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Tom Riddle
Series: A 90s Mixtape [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1921390
Comments: 15
Kudos: 192





	this is not really happening (you bet your life it is)

**Author's Note:**

> Because. A rambling range of stories, this being the second.
> 
> _And the man with the golden gun,_  
>  thinks he knows so much. 
> 
> _Cornflake Girl / Tori Amos_
> 
> * Edited 12/20/20 *

She lies awake, chewing her bottom lip. Her eyes are open but nothing is discernible, she stares blankly ahead, twisting around the anxiety that manages to make her feel foreign. A strange sense like she’s missing a limb, hurting in all the wrong places. Thoughts zoom in and out at terrifying speed, she can’t help but wonder if he felt like an open parentheses on his bed too?

She starts at the sudden noise. A scratch on the wooden floor outside the room she shared with ten other girls. A beat. Another scratch. A beat. Then finally one more. This wasn’t the first time he’d gotten her up in the middle of the night. But this was the first night. After.

After.

She rubs the place under her ribs that throbs like a heartbeat, tender and achy like a bruise. One more scratch. Quick as lightning. He’d start knocking next so she pulls herself up, and mangles herself in the hoodie she keeps at the end of bed.

He’s in the shadows of the hallway when she silently opens the door. He scrunches his brow at her, sleep clothes and hair just halfway in the pony tail she perpetually keeps it in. He’s already dressed for the day.

“Come on.” He’s imperious in the dark and Harry rolls her eyes as she follows him, quickly and quietly, down. They have a hushed argument on the basement landing before she leads them back up to the lower year's hall.

They have to pass by Cole’s door on the way and by the snores coming through they’d have a good thirty minutes until she’d even roll over.

Enough time to figure this out.

They stand seven inches apart. Locked in the girls lavatory in the little kids section, surrounded by glitter chapstick and wads of tissue paper. Harry herself got her first glistening lip gloss from this toilet. It was still under her pillow, applied at night, in the soft haze under her covers, gone by morning. She needed to have the familiarity of this one over his choice of the basement. She needs that quiet comfort this night, or better yet this morning. Needs to see the Strawberry Shortcake sticker she’d put on the last stall, the graffiti below the sinks. She makes him use this one, even though he fussed for a second or two, she wouldn’t allow for anywhere else.

They’d be punished for sure if anyone found them down here, alone, but the moon’s still out and the rug rats are all still a snooze down the hall and Tom had finally gathered the courage to pull her from her bed, no sleep for either of them through the night.

She twitches now, under the fluorescence with Tom Riddle across from her, arms crossed and annoyed at their surroundings. He stares disdainfully at the bright colors and glitter. He rolls his eyes away from the room and she stills, trying to get ready for whatever to come out of his mouth.

One way or another, their world had just begun to change.

“You first.” Tom smirks at her, that same shit eating grin he’s been sending her way since they’ve been born (born to Harriet is the first time she was placed in a too small cot with this boy) and she narrows her eyes as always and looks like she forces herself to pluck all her courage up from where it’s fallen to the floor to lift her hoodie up from the dip of her hip, just high enough for him to see her ribs.

Tom’s eyes widen, and he leans down to look closer. His name.

Tom Marvolo Riddle.

Stark black ink against the olive brown of Harry’s softest skin. He stops the knee jerk reaction of want, to touch his fingers to it, to her. To feel united in all the tiny insignificant ways, to feel like he belonged it’s impossible.

“Your turn.” He considers her for a moment, just long enough for that ever present look of outrage to start to drift over her face before he pulls up his own polo. His skin is shades lighter, and the red ink of her name looks like a cut, a gash.

A wound while hers looks like a burn. It had felt that way too, like someone had taken a knife to his skin and scratched her name all along the most tender parts of him.

She isn’t like him in some ways, and in others they could have been twins, abandoned and clinging together forever. She isn’t hesitant when she reaches out to touch her name on his skin.

He isn’t sure if he likes it yet. This bold claim, this anchor.

“I didn’t know James was my middle name.” She whispers along the rattle and hum of a too old air con unit that hangs halfway out the window. Summer isn’t over yet, it's just the first of August.

The marks showed up yesterday.

-

She feels the itchiness of his anxiety under her skin now. She’s figured it’ll be better at this new school or it won’t. Their closeness can only be detrimental to them this young.

It’s a practiced speech from Dumbledore, she’s heard enough expressionless rote to be able to discern it by now. How many other children did he see in a day? How many other children sat like them now, unsure and amazed, a nervous twitch under their skin? And were they alone? Or together like her and Tom?

He smiles at them benevolently but he looks at his bright yellow wrist watch as he finishes up.

She wants to ask, that and another hundred things, but she’s just as wary as Tom. Magic was believable but to have a soulmate? And for _them_ to be tied so intrinsically together?

She needs time to wrap her mind around it.

She chews on these thoughts, listening as Tom rattles off a litany of questions after Dumbledore finally finishes. His mind worked a mile a minute, jumping from one hurdle to the next and she hates to admit that he’s the smartest person she knows. In that respect, she can absolutely trust him.

She isn’t sure about the soul part just yet.

Dumbledore seems to come alive under the questioning, maybe unused to being pumped for so much information. They talk for several moments and it’s just white noise to Harry. She wouldn’t dare close her eyes but she finds the empty hollow of herself that burns mighty sometimes, a hungry lamp forever wanting fuel, warming her from tip to toes when she lifts a rock without touching it, when her hair grew back overnight. All the times the other kids had hissed desiwitch under their breath and they’d trip in the next second. Magic. It was her magic, right between one rib and another, living under Tom Riddle’s name.

She starts, swallows around her thoughts and starts paying attention. Dumbledore has a pleased half smile, his face steepled between two fingers on one hand, parrying back answers as soon as Tom can fire his questions.

“The marks for those fortunate enough to share time and space with their soulmate will become visible only after the eleventh birthday of the pair.”

“Why eleven?” Dumbledore becomes the teacher he says he is in that moment, crosses one leg over the other, and leans toward them.

“Witches and wizards believe in more than coincidence. One and one. The first repeating number, the first synchronicity. And what else could soulmates be, but in tune with each other. A balance that magic herself has gifted. For one to be ten, and one to be eleven, both must be eleven to receive such marks.” He looks at them in turn and though he hasn’t asked what marks they carry, he seems to certainly know they have each other’s by the twinkling of his eyes. 

“Does everyone in the magical world have a soulmate?” Something dark lurks in his bright blue eyes for a moment as he regards Harry carefully. Even Tom gives her a moment’s more consideration. Magic chose them, a gift he said, and it had to equate to that. The only thought circling her head, they weren’t alone in this.

“Yes and no. It’s taboo to ask any witch or wizard about their soul mark. It is something safeguarded. Some have been lost to their soul mate and some would not be burdened by such a thing. But know this, above all else. Once magic has marked you, you are bound by the oath.” She doesn’t expect that answer, doesn’t like the secretiveness of it, the murky unknown.

But she rolls those words through her head, thinking. She’s eleven and even as it was unknown to her yesterday, she was ten. The thought of permanence is a straw she can not grasp.

She feels an uncontrollable anger, an ache that isn’t her own. She jerks her head sharply in Tom’s direction. His eyes, they’ve never looked at her like they do now. Cold and hateful, like how he looks at Cole, how he looked at Billy. Dirt under his shoe. As much as they argued, they fought, they commiserated, and shared the little joy they knew of with each other, he’d always looked at her with at least respect, a comrade in arms, a hand in the storm.

She feels her own anger spring to life to meet his, and she sits just a tad bit straighter, just a tad bit taller than him. Magic herself. The words wind around her, sink into the marrow of her bones, the core of her strength. The lamp is destroyed but the light remains. She takes a tight hold of his hand, entwined.

It isn’t the first time she’s held his hand, but it is the first time she’s done it with purpose.

His anger shrinks under her skin, gives a little death rattle that shakes her teeth before falling away. He turns back to Dumbledore, another question halfway out of his mouth but Dumbledore’s eyes are on her.

-

It's a week after Professor Dumbledore visits them that Tom seriously considers the break-in. They’ve gone over the idea, tossed between them like an old ball, for years now. He’d start his planning and Harry would knock whatever nonsense that started spewing out of his mouth right back at him. She felt a cold frisson of unease sometimes, afraid of what might be waiting for them there, what wouldn’t be waiting for them.

Years ago they had kept at it, points and negatives, almost obsessed with it until Billy caught them, tossing that familiar verbal ball around. He’d laughed loudly enough that his little crew had tittered from behind him too. He leaned down, taller than them for now, pushing Tom down as he told him that they’d had to file down the horns when his parents dropped him off. Laughing as Harry bent down to help him up, he’d hissed at her about being born in the floor of a corner shop.

Their talk had died down after that, and they’d only manage to mention a whisper of what was when Mary Margaret wasn’t listening or when they’d known for sure no one was around. Privacy was an extravagance that the wards of Wool’s did not know.

And it had bothered them, the stupid things that stupid Billy had said. They’d hated him for years, putting toothbrushes in toilets and itching powder in underwear. An unbroken circle of hate between the three of them until last year, when Billy left. Adopted and shining and sickeningly happy with his new parents.

That had rankled, even under Harry’s skin. They’d passed right over her and Tom, right to bright blond dumb as mud Billy.

It had hurt, a quiet small pitiful thing when they shuffled them out of the bright cafeteria to the dark hallways that led to their rooms. Tom to his, Harry to hers. They’d been split apart at seven, girls and boys with one thin wall between them.

Tom had stopped talking about looking at the files after that.

But it’s only after Dumbledore, he forgets about the perfect plan, of time and leisure to read line after line of a history they don’t know yet. He looks for easy now.

Cole very rarely leaves, but her stash has to run dry at some point. Tom has kept a steady eye on her for years, after the botched exorcism and the time she’d shorn Harry’s hair almost to the scalp, when reading files was the only thing he could think to do between their packed walls.

She’d always come back around in thirty minutes or so. Enough time to walk the two blocks to the shop for a pack of cigarettes and a small glass container of Jamesons.

Just enough time to break the lock on her office (they’d catch nine levels of hell if she tracked it back to them, but Tom swore she wouldn’t when he’d finally let his frantic grip loose around her wrist, his eyes too wide, too excited in one of the halls they’d managed to hide in) and jimmy open the filing cabinet marked O-S. They’d both be in there.

He makes a soft sound of surprise when he pulls her skinny folder out first, hands it to her only after he’s looked in it. She rips it out of his hands, more eager to know now than ever. She’d quashed that kind of curiosity down early on when she was just a dark blemish in a sea of white, but it rose to the surface now, eager and fearful.

She clenches the tiny file in her hands, an old type print, unknown, unknown, unknown. Even her age is an estimate. She knows better than to start crying over this, she swallows, once - twice. Every miserable thing that she’s felt comes hurtling at her at break neck speed, everything wanted for, tended to when she lay alone and lonely in her little bed at night, tucked in a parenthesis so her feet wouldn’t dangle over.

This _lack of_ sits heavy in the pit of her stomach.

He had stopped his mad shuffle through the files and she feels his eyes on her, and the odd, heavy weight of his curiosity, the vile stank of his empty rage. Dumbledore has explained to them all about the names they carried on their ribs, how it would feel, what it meant. She closes the door of her mind as she closes her eyes, blocking out the empty lines and the question marks.

At least she has her last name. That was hers at least.

She hears him rummage back in the cabinet, paper shuffling while she gets ahold of herself. She shakes the awful unwanted feeling off and peers over Tom’s shoulder, at the thick file that he shuffles through until the end. One piece of paper that looks everything and nothing like Harry’s. His parents' names in loopy writing. Merope. Tom.

Harry secretly thinks both names are tragic, and feels him recoil a little at the taste of her pity when she aligns her head over his shoulder. Her eyes scan just as fast as Tom’s, now that she knows what she’s looking at. Mother, deceased. Father, whereabouts unknown. The only word they had in common between them.

Tom’s jaw grinds, his fists clench and normally Harry would badger and bother. You live in someone’s pocket deep enough, you find all the buttons and all the hidey holes. She doesn’t say another word about it though. It’s something in the way he tucks in a little around the shoulders. He always stands up straight.

She places a gentle hand on the bare skin of his arm, and his head jerks to look at her, surprised. He looks down to her hand, his brow furrowed, like he can’t understand this kindness from her.

She barely understands it herself. Only feels the rightness of it, the balm of understanding, the sight of seeing a light on the horizon while standing on a rocky shore.

“Lets go, then. She’ll be back soon.” He nods but he doesn’t move, only when she pulls her hand back, stuffs it inside her too baggy jeans. He nods, a grimace as he looks one more time into the filing cabinet. He pushes it closed and the click it makes seems to echo inside Cole’s office.

They’re in the garden out back by the time Cole gets back in her office, a cigarette smoked, a seal already broken, and her anger brewing a storm.

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr // ohyondermemphis
> 
> What do you think guys? Because I literally have no idea where this is going but by god it’s going somewhere.


End file.
